Take this with a grain of salt as it comes from the print version of last month’s Empire magazine, which I’m still waiting to get a scan of, but the magazine has an interview with Tristan Oliver, the cinematographer on the (awesome-looking) Fantastic Mr. Fox. Oliver seems to imply that Wes Anderson directed the film via email. Which sounds a lot like, you know, not directing. From this guy:
According to an inadvertently extraordinary interview with the animators in this month’s Empire, [Wes Anderson] is keeping his distance from the set and directing via e-mail*, sending in his favourite DVDs to give an impression of what he’d like to see. Cinematographer Tristan Oliver, asked about his working relationship with Anderson, replies: [Quoting Empire] “I think Wes doesn’t understand what you can do, and he often wants us to do what you can’t do, and the length of time the process takes … I don’t think he quite comprehends that, and how difficult it is to change something once you’ve started. It takes a big amount of someone’s time to change a very small thing. I think he also doesn’t understand that an animator is a performer. An animator is an actor. And this is the secret to animation: you direct your animator, you do not direct the puppet, because the puppet is an inanimate object. You direct an animator as if you’re directing an actor, and they will give you a performance. So we’ll get a note back from Wes saying ‘that arm movement is wrong.’ But that arm movement is part of a fluid performance. And that has been really quite difficult for the animators.”
Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs was a children’s book from the seventies about a town called Chewandswallow where it rained food, written by someone who was probably really high. Sony made a movie out of it, and as you can see from the trailer below, they turned it into an origin story about how it came to be that this town rains meatballs. Pixar seems to be the only animation studio that can do kids’ movies without babytalking, so to speak, and since I don’t have any kids that I know of, I have hard time giving a crap about a movie like this. I’ll let FirstShowing handle it:
In comparison to Planet 51 [I'll have that trailer up later today -ed.], I actually want to see this one just a bit more. Something about all that food and the comedy, it just gets me. Though I’m worried that like Sony Animation’s last movie, Surf’s Up, it won’t be as good as the trailers make it seem.
Yes, you see, the food and the comedy, it really gets him. Fascinating, right?
Disney’s old-school 2D animated film The Princess and the Frog recently released a trailer and a poster. It’s a new twist on an old tale - this time, the heroine is a black girl from Jazz-Age New Orleans named “Princess Tiana.” She used to be named “Maddy,” but people thought that was too low-class, too slave-sounding, and too close to “Mammy,” so they changed it to Tiana, and now she sounds like an Asian pornstar.
In this version, when Tiana kisses the frog, instead of him turning into a prince, she turns into a frog. Which I suppose is more true to life. Relationships do tend towards the lowest common denominator. In fact, this is a lot like the version I wrote. “Hey, Princess, I’m gonna put my evil in you,” croaked the frog. “Psst. I hear you’re into Wart Showers.”
Astro Boy is an upcoming film from Imagi animation. It’s kind of like that Korean ad where RoboCop eats fried chicken. Only this time they turned Bob’s Big Boy into Iron Man. Bottom line, Asians are big on their cyborg-American food combos. Anyway, the movie still looks pretty lame, and the tagline “Meet the boy built for adventure” still isn’t doing anyone any favors.
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This is the new trailer for 9 (that’s right, 9, not Nine. The filmmakers think you and your Chicago Manual of Style can suck it.).
9 is an upcoming sci-fi CGI animated movie created and directed by Shane Acker. It is co-produced by Tim Burton and Timur Bekmambetov and animated by Attitude Studio (in Luxembourg) and by Starz Animation (in Toronto), with a few sequences done by Duncan Studios in LA. Voice cast: Elijah Wood, Christopher Plummer, Martin Landau, John C. Reilly, Jennifer Connelly and Crispin Glover. 9 will be released 9.9.9. [Source]
So basically it’s Wall E if it were produced by Tim Burton and the Wanted guy. Instead of a robot, the post apocalyptic world is inhabited by mutant things, who discover another race of evil, more warlike mutant things. With whom they must inevitably do battle.
